The surprise in Down And Out In London And Paris (weekdays, 10.45pm), running as part of Radio 4's The Real George Orwell strand, is the author's voice, provided by Joseph Millson. It's light and Bertie Wooster soft, which is right when you think about it. Back in the 1920s, Etonians like Orwell hadn't learned how to bloke it up when mixing with the less fortunate and didn't throttle back the top notes of their accents.

More important than the voice, the thing that really marks out Orwell as an Englishman from antiquity is that he doesn't send himself up. Contrast that with the middle-aged scribblers representing England in The World Cup For Writers (Thursday, 11.30am, R4). These playwrights, critics and fantasy novelists are Orwell's heirs but they project themselves very differently. Joe Dunthorne's account of the English team meeting the Scots on a bleak and grassy heath in Partick has barely begun before they're all riffing on just how bookish and unlikely they look. The team's founder is so tall and thin that "he looks entirely italicised when he runs". National characteristics soon assert themselves on the field. The team in white have a slightly apologetic air about taking the ball from someone else. It's as if being pen pushers made them somehow doubly English. Even Scots novelists lead with their elbows. The English are, by their own admission, fey Oxbridge types. Football is as near as they get to their elemental maleness, which leaks out in the changing room afterwards. Like all amateur sides they suspect that the opposition's best player is a ringer. They're not wrong. He's a poet. What does it prove? That, no matter what they appear to be doing on the outside, most men are actually playing football in their heads? That Englishmen will make jokes at their own expense to save you the trouble of doing so? That this is the kind of programme Radio 4 can make in its sleep?

John Osborne, who previously brought us John Peel's Shed, explains what happened when he decided to pursue the shopportunities arrayed in The Newsagent's Window (Sunday, 7.15pm, R4). How it led him to acquire the entire VHS collection of a man who'd just discovered DVD, to an innocent session with a masseuse who looked at his back and offered useful life advice, plus an encounter with a vicar in Bungay "who used words like shenanigans, higgledy-piggledy and kerfuffle". The studio audience is big enough to laugh when called for and small enough to keep quiet when it's not. Osborne quietly makes a point about the nerve and generosity it takes to seek contact in the real world rather than the digital one, and the production has a dream-like air which makes it an ideal companion for those fending off the existential melancholy that is the Sunday evening ironer's lot.

Ian D Montfort Is: Unbelievable (Thursday, 9.30pm, R2) continues radio's long-running affair with illusion, a world in which you'd think it would have no business. Montfort calls himself a "celebrity spirit medium". He also calls himself "Britain's first spokesman for the pseudo sciences", which deliberately implies that the BBC management has "complied" his act within an inch of its life. "The production team have not altered the sense of what was experienced by the live audience in any way," promises an opening voiceover. When he's funny it doesn't really matter whether you believe him.